Monthly Archives: July 2005

Maxwell unshushed

Nancy Pearl says Shhhh!

Esteemed book acolyte Nancy Pearl repents, reprieves, and reprises:

Book Lust, the 2003 predecessor to her readers’ guide [More Book Lust], remains popular. Barnes & Noble Inc.’s flagship store in Seattle at the University Village shopping mall keeps 38 copies in stock, compared with one or two for most books, says Cameron Morrison, a spokesman for the store.

Inevitably, Pearl gets chided for leaving authors out. While walking down George Street during the Sydney Writers’ Festival in May, a woman approached her about omitting William Maxwell, the late writer and editor of The New Yorker magazine. “Leaving him out was a huge mistake,” says Pearl.

Pearl says she finishes fewer than half the books she starts. For some readers, that has been her most valuable advice: She gives them permission to stop slogging through books that don’t captivate them. Her rule for any reader under 50 is to give a book 50 pages before giving up on it. Readers over 50 subtract their age from 100 for the number of pages.

After a stint reviewing books for the Library Journal magazine, Pearl tired of being a critic. “I just thought, ‘Why am I wasting my time on books I’m not liking?'”
…
Pearl’s next project is a reading guide for children, tentatively titled “Book Crush.”

Later this year, her stops will include a writers’ conference in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and a booksellers’ gathering in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Before that, she will sign books at Archie McPhee’s, the Seattle novelty store where the [Pearl-inspired] Librarian doll hangs on a wall alongside action figures of Jesus, Einstein and Shakespeare.

It outsells them all.

Update: Speaking of shushing librarians, how long has it been since you saw Ghostbusters? I saw it again recently at the Sunshine Cinema’s midnight movie series, and it was if anything funnier than the first time. An excellent choice for reunions with your Murray-appreciating peers.

Seattle Action-Hero Librarian Stokes Reading Habit [Bloomberg]

You might as well live

From a Llewellyn Journal profile:

Migene González-Wippler is a cultural anthropologist and has worked as a science editor for the American Museum of Natural History, The American Institute of Physics, and the United Nations in Vienna. She has written over 20 books about religion and mysticism, the latest being Keys to the Kingdom: Jesus & The Mystic Kabbalah, which reveals the interrelationship between kabbalah and Christianity. For instance, Spain was the birthplace of the first kabbalists, as well as many noted Jewish mystics and theologians; the body of Jesus’s teachings is essentially kabbalistic; and the structure of the Lord’s Prayer uncannily reflects that of the Tree of Life, a central kabbalah concept. Devout and skeptical readers alike will find much food for thought in Gonzalez-Wippler’s clear-eyed yet sensitive analysis.
…
[LJ:] Why do you love to write?

[MGW:] I don’t love to write. Writing is one of the most agonizing experiences a human being can have. It’s like giving birth. I write because I must. It is a compulsion, a driving need. I’m only at peace when I am writing. And like Dorothy Parker, I love having written.

Categories: ,

The Algonquin’s star search

From Broadway World:

The Algonquin Hotel’s Oak Room will celebrate its 25th Anniversary by sponsoring a Young Artist Competition, with the winner awarded a contract for a two-week engagement in its legendary cabaret venue in early 2006.

The competition will be limited to vocal artists under the age of 30 with a background in musical theater, cabaret or jazz, whose work embraces the Great American Songbook, including (but not limited to) the works of Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Harold Arlen, Richard Rodgers and Stephen Sondheim. Sing, you sinners!

Speaking of round tones at the Round Table, here’s Richard Eilers’s witty account in the Observer of flying from London to get spiffed up for the annual Dorothy Parker gala known as Parkerfest. He writes of the festive Bathtub Gin Ball and Speakeasy Cruise:

Our vessel, the Diplomat, was filling up fast at the quay, people chattering excitedly. But my partner Carolyn and I stood nervously apart. I was still frightened by the whole ‘fan’ thing. I collected her first editions, had flown across the Atlantic just to be at the party and, well, tried to buy her dress, but I was not obsessive, obviously. How would I deal with the uber-fan, who knew more about her underwear habits than was strictly healthy? You had to approach these people warily.

This year’s Parkerfest—run by the devoted and admirably well-informed Kevin Fitzpatrick of the Dorothy Parker Society of New York—runs from September 30 till October 2. Here’s more info. I’m planning to be there. I even know how to Balboa.

Cartoon caption contest: Things to do in Denver when you’re not dead

From Denver’s Craigslist:

Do you play the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest? – 52

looking for signs of intelligent life…you…fem 45-55, youthful, smart, fit, attractive, stable, european…n/s

This woman has taste, Coloradans! The new drawing is pretty straight, but agreeably kinky, at least. And you’ll have something to agree on the first time you meet: the current entries are blech. The third entry (“Frankly, your brochure is a bit misleading,” Richard Woodward, Clemson, S.C.) is the only funnyish one, so I hope you both vote for that before you take your moonlit walk on the beach. Is there a beach in Denver? You tell me, lovebirds. And the new winner, Bob Schwartz of Cincinnati, wasn’t my pick but is perfectly adequate and will provide plenty of heated, that is to say hot, political debate between the two of you. May you get oodles of dates, Ms. X, and may you and your new sweetie submit some captions that are better than this lot.

Categories: , ,

New emdashes feature: Eustace Google


In which I google things so you don’t have to, at least the things I think are worth pursuing into spyberspace. From last week (there’s a new issue, yes, but I was just in Canada, where they just barely got 7/25): who hasn’t been amazed, haunted, grossed out, and delighted by John Colapinto’s “Bloodsuckers”? Superb piece. It just, I don’t know, latches onto you and doesn’t let go. Anyway, I bet you were wondering some things, because I certainly was, and the info. superh. is eager as ever to help. (No guarantees on the absolute fact-checkability of the links! But what’s the risk, really, compared with wading into a pond hoping something bloodthirsty will saw into your legs?)

To get started, buy mad genius Roy T. Sawyer’s Leech Biology and Behaviour (464 pp., 50 quid) on Amazon UK. Then visit the company he founded at Biopharm (“The Biting Edge of Science”).

Colapinto says Sawyer’s office is reached “through a large room lined with glass-fronted cases containing leech and bloodletting paraphernalia: antique leech jars, lancets, fleams, scarificators, cupping devices, bleeding bowls, and barber poles. (Nineteenth-century ‘barber-surgeons’ not only cut hair but also bled patients; thus the red-and-white striped poles outside barbershops, which represent blood and bandages.)”

Sawyer also has a poster for that 1960 classic, The Leech Woman (“User Comments: Could Have Been Better,” IMDb). Also above.

“According to Sawyer, the earliest references to medicinal leeching appear in ancient Sanscrit writings by the Indian physicians Caraka and Sushruta, who recommended that leeches be applied to snakebites and boils…”

Here’s 19th-century leech overzealot François Joseph Victor Broussais (hyphenated in this source). Freshen up your French!

What in the world is foam fractionation?

To get your giant leeches into a groovy mood, play some Brahms.

Back in ’02, “Leech Rattle,” “No Pulp Leech,” “Leech Loom,” “Sharp Leech,” “No Pulp Leech,” and “Primrose Leech Coasters” were on a list of Ten Thousand Statistically Grammar-Average Fake Band Names. Somehow I think the latter would have the most luck in these non sequitur times. Though “Leech Loom” has great possibilities. (I also like “Pea Who,” from the same list.)

Not mentioned in Colapinto’s article, leech tour de force Stand By Me. Incidentally, Attack of the Giant Leeches came out in 1959; as you already know, The Leech Woman was 1960. And Stand By Me takes place in 1959. Leech Girl, 1969. Could leeches be another metaphor for the Red Menace? Here’s a synopsis of Attack of the Giant Leeches:

Giant creatures that look something like a cross between a leech and and an octopus, minus the arms, rise out of the Florida swamps to grab a snack. Steve, the good looking game warden, begins an investigation after people begin dissappearing and strange tales of some kind of bizarre creature in the swamps begin to go around the nearby swamp community. The local sheriff doesn’t believe any of it and will have no part in the investigation, which leaves Steve, his girlfriend Nan and her father Doc to investigate it on their own. The movie has a sub-plot as well. Dave, the fat general store owner has a beautiful young wife named Liz who also happens to be a complete shrew, and an unfaithful one at that. She has an affair with Cal and when Dave finds out, bad things happen.

Leeches! is a more recent addition to the canon. Although a former doctor, classy Irishman Richard Leech has nothing whatsoever to do with anaesthetic fangs or cauliflower-ear drainage.

Is Gerald Scarfe’s full-page, giddily gruesome drawing (note the dire progress chart and the worrying prescription tablet) scientifically accurate? You be the judge: here’s a Hirudo medicinalis in the flesh. Your flesh? My flesh? Try not to lose a finger. Also, try not to be this Hong Kong hiker, who has a gross story to tell. “According to the article, doctors only managed to remove the stubborn bloodsucker with forceps after applying anaesthesia to the woman’s nose. ‘Direct removal of a live leech might be difficult because of its powerful attachment to the mucosa and its slimy and mobile body,’ the [medical] journal said.”

I was already thinking about various terrible situations after finishing the Colapinto piece, so here are two guides to teaching leeches who’s boss should you find them on your person. From the second: “NOTE: It is generally not advised to attempt removing a leech by burning with a cigarette; applying mosquito repellent, shampoo, or salt; or pulling at the leech. This can result the leech regurgitating into the wound and causing infection much worse than the leech bite itself.” Eeeeeg.

If there’s something you’d like Eustace Googled, send ‘er on in; no job too small.

Update: Here’s At the Leech Farm With Larry Leech, courtesy of Worm World: “Gotta help some human with blood trouble!”


Categories: , , , ,

Airhead Jordan

What’s talent like yours doing in a movie like this?

Here’s my pal Jasmin Chua’s voting off the island of Logan’s Run: The Steve Buscemi Years, I mean The Island, which, as I explained recently, is the best possible summer movie for you, provided you’re a 14-year-old boy. Scarlett’s lips will forever be in your dreams, and quite rightly, too. Chua:

Meanwhile, Lincoln is spending a lot of time, i.e. enough to set off the facility’s proximity alarms, with Jordan Two-Delta (Scarlett Johansson) whose bee-stung lips are beginning to swell to terrifying, Melanie Griffith proportions. She spouts hokey lines with overly rehearsed, not-a-girl-not-yet-a-woman innocence, like “I know you’re lying because your eyes don’t smile.”…. Jordan vacillates between childlike bemusement and childlike trepidation, merely registering, and not reacting to, the chaos on the screen.

If you’re not a 14-year-old boy, may I recommend almost anything else? And actually, if you’re a 14-year-old boy, could ya please rent Lost in Translation? It’s just so good for you.